


The Secrecy Our Smiles Take On

by azephirin



Series: Nekkid Avengers (& Co.) [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), MCU, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Everyone Is Poly Because Avengers, Everything is Beautiful and Nothing Hurts, F/M, Feminist!Natasha, Future Fic, Gen, Implied Relationships, Implied Sexual Content, James Bond Movies, M/M, Multi, Natasha Romanov Is Not Impressed, Nekkid Pix, Nude Modeling, Nudity, Other, Polyamory, Pregnancy, Steve Feels, Steve Rogers: Fandom Bicycle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-01
Updated: 2014-05-01
Packaged: 2018-01-21 11:26:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1548899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azephirin/pseuds/azephirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of nudes drawn by Steve Rogers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Secrecy Our Smiles Take On

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [](http://thedeadparrot.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**thedeadparrot**](http://thedeadparrot.dreamwidth.org/) for audiencing, and to [](http://minoanmiss.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**minoanmiss**](http://minoanmiss.dreamwidth.org/) for listening to me natter and complain. Title from "[Having a Coke with You](http://mappingthemarvellous.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/having-a-coke-with-you/)," by Frank O'Hara. Steve and Bucky's conversation is from a chat with [](http://ninhursag.dreamwidth.org/profile)[](http://ninhursag.dreamwidth.org/)**ninhursag** ages ago.

Against the darkening sky and the constellations of lights blinking to life as the city wakes to dusk, caught in the rays of the floodlamps that wash Avengers Tower, Sam stands, wings unfurled, ready for flight. His body, poised to launch himself into the air, leans toward the edge of the roof, but he’s turned back to look at Steve, and he’s grinning, arms spread, about to leap and challenging anyone behind him to follow. Like a warrior angel who needs no armor but power and ferocity, his nakedness is almost inconsequential, but it’s too beautiful not to capture: the breadth of his shoulders, the solidity of his thighs, the oddly delicate bisected line of his clavicle, the length of his cock.

Another step and he could fly forever, untethered from the world.

+||+||+

The first challenge: aligning their schedules to get them all in one room. The second challenge: making Tony sit still.

He finally does, though, his legs stretched out in front of him, leaning against the sofa, anchored by Pepper’s hand in his hair. His head is tilted slightly back, just enough to brush Pepper’s growing belly. The scars on his chest from the arc reactor and its removal are evident, and in this position his cock is plainly visible, but he’s relaxed and unashamed where he sits between Pepper’s knees. Beside Pepper is Jim Rhodes. His posture is straighter, and his expression is warier—Tony would walk naked in front of the world, but Rhodes does not. Pepper is leaning against Rhodes, and he has gathered her against him with one arm.

Pepper is wearing a strand of pearls around her neck, but she is otherwise, like Tony and Rhodes, naked. The pearls are a luminous white against her ivory-gold skin, and she looks like a fertility goddess, bountiful and serene, at rest with her lovers. But a quick tilt of her head, arch of an eyebrow, and she’s a CEO again, measured and precise, regardless of what she is or isn’t wearing.

In a moment Tony will turn around and complain that he could be in the lab blowing things up, or crack an awful joke that will make Rhodes roll his eyes and shove at Tony’s shoulder with his foot, and do one or several of another thousand annoying, irrepressible things. But for the moment the three of them—soon to be four—are peaceful, gentled, as they so seldom get to be.

+||+||+

Clint and Natasha each have their own quarters, the two halves of a floor of Avengers Tower; Steve knows that they also maintain various safehouses, separately and together, locally as well as spread throughout various corners of the world. They have fewer boltholes than they used to, before Natasha flung all of SHIELD’s secrets online for the world to see, but they’ve been building their inventory back up, Natasha especially. She likes to feel safe.

Right now they’re in Natasha’s quarters, in her living room, which is surprisingly traditional. She’s curled up with Clint on a soft-looking white couch, with her feet and legs covered by a blue throw blanket. There’s an actual fireplace with a fire in it—how that works in a skyscraper, Steve has no idea—flanked by two sets of built-in bookshelves. And then, of course, there’s the wide window with the view of the city, gray today, with the lights of the buildings and bridges peering through the fog. Natasha’s skin is rosy in the firelight, and her breasts are perfect pale curves. Clint’s skin is rougher, brushed on his chest and belly with light brown hair that thickens and darkens around his cock. There’s light scarring from when he went through a plate-glass window during the Chitauri battle, and heavier but more discrete scarring in other places: bullet wounds, something that looks like it could have been a knife.

Despite the evidence of past wounds, the scene is tranquil. Natasha is settled comfortably against Clint’s chest, with her head on his shoulder and his arm around her, and the drape of the blanket and the flicker of the fire just add to the coziness. Natasha makes a face, though, as she observes what’s happening on the television a few feet away from them. Clint, meanwhile, looks long-suffering, pressing a kiss to the top of her head.

“Pussy Galore? Really?”

“It’s just a name,” Clint tries.

“It’s ridiculous. And misogynist.”

“It’s not—”

Natasha doesn’t even let him finish the sentence. “Reducing a woman to a sexual function? That’s not misogynist? And you said children watch these movies!”

“Well, not children, exactly. They’re meant for adults.”

“You told me you grew up watching them with Barney. How old were you then?”

“Um…OK, yeah, probably like fifth or sixth grade. They were on TV all the time.”

“Uh-huh. I get to pick the movie next time.”

It’s hard for Steve to draw when he’s trying not to laugh.

+||+||+

Jane Foster sits in an easy chair in Thor’s quarters. She’s cross-legged with an iPad in her lap, and she looks up from her reading with a smile as though she’s been interrupted, but not by someone unwelcome.

Dr. Foster is slender of build, lanky, delicate-looking unless you know her—know her determination, her ferocious intellect, her unending curiosity. Her hair is tied up in a loose bun, but a few strands fall down around her shoulders, drawing the eye to her graceful collarbone and small, high breasts. She’s not someone who pays much attention to her appearance—or even remembers that she has one—and when you deal with Jane, you usually deal with her mind. So sometimes it’s easy to overlook the fact that she’s beautiful—fine-featured, full-lipped, dark-eyed.

One of Dr. Foster’s hands is on the tablet, and the other reaches up to interlace her fingers with Thor’s. He’s standing behind her, one hand in hers, the other holding Mjolnir, and he’s tall enough that everything from the tops of his thighs upward is visible. Though he’s not human, he looks like an anatomical model of human perfection. There’s essentially no muscle in his body that isn’t flawlessly defined, from the _vastus lateralis_ in his thighs to his frankly ridiculous abdominals and obliques to the _pectoralis major_ and the deltoid. Thor is like a one-man (one-god?) anatomy class. And that’s leaving aside the bronzed hair and ocean-blue eyes.

In a sense, he’s Dr. Foster’s inverse—a physical ideal, literally a blond god, whom an awestruck onlooker might forget is also intelligent, generous, fair, calmly accepting of the foibles of those around him. He’s infinitely more foreign in this world than Steve is, but, friendly and eager to learn, he takes it with equanimity.

Steve draws Thor with his gaze turned slightly down, focused on Jane, smiling.

+||+||+

Darcy lies flopped on her belly on the bed in her dorm room—“campus housing,” she’d corrected Steve, because apparently it’s different when you’re in graduate school—at Columbia. The room is happily untidy: the bed unmade, a scattering of shoes on the floor, others jammed into a holder that hangs on the closet door, a dresser replete with candles and perfumes and an iPod in a dock.

Darcy’s head faces the end of the bed, her knees are on the pillow, and her feet are brushing the wall. A book lies open in front of her—the title, _The Spirit of the Laws_ , is barely visible from the running heads—and one of her hands rests lightly on the pages, holding her place. She’s clad only in her horn-rimmed reading glasses and, claiming cold toes, a pair of black thigh-high stockings, which seem a bit like overkill for just toes, but it feels inappropriate to complain. The comforter has been pushed aside and piled alongside her: the room is warm.

Her long hair spills like a fall of dark honey around her shoulders, and she reaches absentmindedly with her free hand to push it back behind her ear. Every part of her body is lush: the creamy round of her shoulders, the slope and arch of her back, the soft hemispheres of her ass. The crease between buttock and thigh is tantalizing, the perfect path for a curious fingertip.

In the lower corner, bleeding off the edge of the page, there is a second pillow, and an empty half of the bed.

+||+||+

Sitting diffidently on the edge of the sofa in his quarters, his elbows on his knees, looking up almost hesitantly, Dr. Bruce Banner is only a man.

He has an organic, unassuming handsomeness: a strong nose, kind dark eyes, and a rumple of curls. There are wrinkles beneath and at the corners of his eyes, and they deepen when he gives one of his rare smiles. Banner is graying, most obviously at his temples and in his beard, which he hasn’t shaven in a few days, a sign that he’s been cloistered in the lab with Tony. The two of them are almost exactly the same height, and Banner has a slightly stockier building, but somehow he seems the smaller of the two, when you look at them together. Tony works to take up more space than nature allotted him; Banner struggles to look as though he uses less.

Nothing about Banner is conventional—not his encompassing, creative mind, not his Dickensian background, not his tremendous alter ego—except for his middle-aged human body, which is utterly ordinary. It’s covered in dark hair, specked with the occasional gray, which grows lightly on his arms and legs, and thickly on his chest. His thrice-daily yoga has defined the power in his shoulders and thighs, but his middle has thickened with age and a regular diet. It’s nice, actually, a reminder that he has lived to grow older, that he has enough to eat—that he’s as safe as any of them can be.

+||+||+

In their bed on a rainy morning, Bucky is asleep.

For once, he’s peaceful and still, his breaths even and slow as he lies amid the rumpled white sheets, which against his pale skin make it look almost translucent. The bedclothes cover him about halfway, revealing the sleek lines of his back and, where it’s stretched out to the side, his new bionic arm, unadorned, flexible, and black. Steve remembers Bucky looking at himself in the mirror after it was fitted for the first time, and putting his opposite hand over the left shoulder, where the star had been. He had nodded briefly but definitely. Right now the fingers lie relaxed near Steve’s thigh, not quite touching, and Steve wants to stroke them, but he also doesn’t want to wake Bucky up: with this new prosthesis, the doctors said he would be able to feel touch, and Bucky reports that he can.

Bucky’s hair is short again, although like always it’s a mess unless he slicks it back with something. Bucky gets grumpy when reminded of his tremendous bedhead, but Steve loves running his hands through it, loves that he’s allowed to touch. He could spend all day touching Bucky, and occasionally has.

Steve is filling in some crosshatching for the blanket when Bucky wakes up. He opens his eyes and, for a brief but very clear second, looks surprised and confused. Then he sees Steve, and reaches for his hand at the same time Steve reaches for his. Bucky yawns. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

Bucky turns on to his side, and Steve can’t resist sifting through his thick, obstreperous hair. Predictably, Bucky glares, and Steve grins. “Morning, tumbleweed.”

Bucky glares harder, and Steve kisses him, because he can.

Bucky nods at Steve’s sketchpad. "Can I see?"

Steve makes a face at the drawing. It could use improvement: the proportion of Bucky’s shoulders is wonky, and he didn’t quite get the shadowing right on Bucky’s back. Bucky is the actual subject of the piece, though, so Steve says, “Sure,” because that’s only fair, and then adds, “It's not that great,” because it isn’t.

“Well, no, you got to work with the model you have,” Bucky cracks.

“It's the artist, not the subject matter, I promise,” Steve says, and flips the pad around to show its contents, wonky proportions and all, to Bucky. Bucky’s eyes get wide, and Steve mutters, “I told you it wasn’t so good.”

“That’s what you see?” Bucky looks away. “Jesus, Stevie, I hope you're not too badly disappointed.”

“That’s how you are,” Steve says, emphatically, and carefully detaches the page from the pad and gives it to Bucky. “I’ll draw that every day until you believe me.”

Bucky pulls Steve down and kisses him. His flesh hand is trembling slightly, and Steve wraps his fingers around it. “Until the end of the line, Buck,” he says, and Bucky whispers, “Yeah.”


End file.
